Here’s a fun form of culture jamming — a very soft and cuddly act of public defacement not unlike smiley face graffiti — that’s picking up attention online this month: “Eyebombing.”

“Eyebombing” is the art of sticking “googly eyes” (a.k.a. “wiggly eyes” — the glue-on sort of craft store kind) onto an inanimate object in the public sphere in a way that cleverly lends the object the appearance of a living creature.

The purpose? According to eyebombing.com, it’s “humanizing the world, one googly eye at a time.” A wee bit subversive in nature, like drawing a mustache on a billboard celebrity. Take a snapshot of this public (de-?)facement, post it to eyebombing.com, link to it on a facebook group or flickr group or some other social network, and you have a mounting trend that — while nothing new, really — is emerging as a cute internet “meme.” We could possibly also call this meme an instance of the popular uncanny. But maybe not in the way you might, at first, suspect.

Sure, it’s just anthropomorphizing. Such gestures — which give the attributes of life to an inorganic object — often are “uncanny” because they confuse the assumed boundary between what makes something an object and what makes something — anything — a subject, capable of “returning the gaze.” We might feel an aura of weirdness for just the first moment we look at the object and see that it is “looking back” when it’s not supposed to. This reaction harkens back to what Freud once termed the “surmounted” childhood beliefs in an animistic world, in this case rendering everyday urban life as fantastic as the trees that talk in fairy tales or the Muppets of television childhood. Only now Oscar the Grouch doesn’t live a trashcan — he IS the trashcan. From guard rails to postal boxes, as the result of eyebombing, the objects of everyday life become doll-like with those cheap stick-on “googly” eyes so familiar to us from craft stores.

But googly eyes are plastic simulacra to begin with. They do not “move of their own accord” per se — in fact, it would probably be far more uncanny and disturbing to see human beings with plastic eyes like these on their faces instead. In other words, this is a representation of the gaze, a plastic staging of the uncanny, rather than a genuinely haunting act of defamiliarization.

Yet it is still — at least at first glance — a little uncanny. Indeed, it is the eyes themselves, far more than the objects they transform, which I would say are the harbingers of the popular uncanny. Is it not the familiarity of the googly eyes — not of the defamiliarized postal box, but the plastic eyes themselves — used in such a strange way, that makes them seem so odd, if not haunting? The googly eyes themselves are displaced from the faces of dolls and other crafts and are now potentially looking at us from anywhere, especially places where we would not expect to encounter them. The “bombed” site — a guard rail, a trash can, a light switch — is surprisingly looking at us when we turn around, precisely like those eyes on the GEICO dollar bill stack from advertising (“I always feel like somebody’s watching me.”)

Of course, this is not really scaring anyone. Disturbing a few, momentarily, perhaps. But we remain “surmounted” because we are not fooled by the eyes — they are not realistic the way that, say, fantastically customized contact lenses or the eyeballs from a “reborn doll” are. No — these “craft” items are virtually two-dimensional in all their clitter-clatter spinning disc glory, and are located more in the realm of concepts than animals. Indeed, they seem to make a statement more than talk for themselves. The subversive act of rendering a public, hard object as a personalized and personified object is still potent; it can defamiliarize in a very palpable manner, like all good art — but it does so in a way that is not felt as threatening. Its unreality is domesticated — which, while seemingly lacking in the haunting power of the uncanny is nonetheless a a defining element of many items of the “popular” uncanny, which sublimates but never entirely buries repressed desire in its attempt to make the unfamiliar more familiar — often by employing the tactics of childhood fantasy.

Eyebombing is the Fozzie-Bearification of the community property — the Jim Hensoning of the public square. There is a return of the repressed invoked here, but it very well may a repressed belief in the power of folk art, which has been increasingly “surmounted” by technology — or even just a psychological reawakening of some relationship to a children’s puppet from days gone by — which here returns with a twinge of uncanny recognition.

The photo above is a “personalized urn” that British firm Cremation Solutions can create, using 3-D facial reconstruction software. There is obviously an uncanny element to this urn, which reduces the body into ash stored into a simulacrum of one of its components — a dismembered head with a removable skullcap — in the form of an unblinking mannequin head whose features bare an alarming similarity to the dearly departed.

At first I was taken aback by the image, both because of the accuracy of the likeness and because of the unexpected treatment of a living person, as if he were already dead. As it sunk in, I realized that most presidential figures and celebrities — indeed, anyone whose image is popular — are memorialized in a similar fashion, having their images frozen into postage stamps and plaster busts — and so, conceptually, this tribute is not so aberrant. But the uncanny is still omnipresent in the unblinking return of the gaze, the doppelganger of the dead person permanently placed on your mantle. There’s a reason why graveyards spook us: they are the spaces where the dead “live”; cremation urns can respect the role of the dead in a loving family’s home, but the more lifelike the urn, the more uncanny it becomes, making the boundaries between life and death — subject and object — very blurry. The commercial marketing of such memorials, both loved ones and celebrities, sold “on demand” (just $2600 for an urn that can hold all the ashes; $600 for a smaller keepsake), integrating the unfamiliar “magic” of high technology with the domestic familiarity of family photographs, brings this into the realm of the popular uncanny.

I could go on and on about the stock elements of the unheimlich in these urns. But one thing this particular practice brings to mind is a rising cultural trend toward employing 3D image rendering in ways that clone or replicate us. The art world seems to be responding to this with great interest. Visit the WebDesigner’s Depot on “Mind-Blowing Hyperrealistic Sculptures” or Eric Testroete’s Papercraft Self-Portrait series to muse over the implications and potentials of all this technology. I suspect we’ll see many more “personalized” objects mapped off images of ourselves or popular images in the media — there’s no end to our sense of wonder about ourselves, but one has to also wonder where natural fascination ends and cultural narcissism begins.

If you don’t already know, LOLcats are artfully captioned photographs of animals, as in the image above. They’re pretty funny, entirely created by the visitors to icanhascheezburger.com (whose domain name refers to one of the first LOLcat images that got widely distributed online and started this whole thing). Like many online “sharing” sites, I consider LOLcats a fantastic form of new media folk art that attests to the popular draw of the uncanny.

How can a cute little kitten be “uncanny”? The given framework for these captioned photos imbues the subject of the image (the cat) with a language it does not speak (a regressive, childlike “kitten” language of its own invention that gives the cat a distinctive “voice”), blurring the boundary between human and animal. Freud calls this “the omnipotence of thoughts” in his article on “The Uncanny” — a psychological projection inherent to animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic fantasies. Thus, it is quite normal that this unnatural and imaginary language of the LOLCAT is the equivalent of “baby speak”: the animals are really like children more than they are like cats. The language in the caption, moreover, matches the human-like expressions and gestures in the image so well that a spectator may be struck by the synchronicity at play, and perhaps feels the uncanny affect because reality (these are actual photos) and fantasy (the imagined/joke situation identified by the caption) become blurred, if only for a moment, springing us into laughter. Not all the LOLcat images are about danger and death (as the one above — “nositz!”), and rarely are they “dark” or “scary” in their affect, but the humor can be intellectually unsettling because there is often a “secret” desire that the cat seems to be expressing in its caption which also reminds us of Freud’s discussion of the Uncanny as an expression of that which was to remain a secret (for him, the Repressed), suddenly returned and revealed. Our childhood wishes (for a pet, like a doll, that can talk) seem actualized.

Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that the group responsible for “LOLCats” would build on their popularity by hosting a similar “photoshopping” site in the form of a “doppelganger” maker: totallylookslike.com.

The pictures that users upload speak for themselves, by displaying side by side graphic associations. Most users upload pictures of celebrities and film characters that look alike, as if they were unintentional “doubles” for one another by virture of their physical features and poses.

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply that they look like long-lost-twins, but they also provide the sort of “a-ha!” moment of recognition that Freud talks about in his essay on “Das Unheimliche” — the click of comprehending a “secret” correspondence, as if — with the image above, for instance — the unspoken inspiration behind Tim Burton’s artistic treatment of The Penguin was suddenly unveiled.

Of course, there are also “natural” lookalikes, or body doubles in the popular imagination. More common on totallylookslike.com are jokester post that bend the rules a bit to generate humor in ways that touch on uncanny similarities to make a point.

Here we have “New York” — a realiTV personality — matched up with Janice, a character from The Muppet Show. Yes, they both wear too much mascara and lip gloss. Is that a sufficient condition for them to be lookalikes? Or is this simply a photographic slur?

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply the unexpected correspondence between the appearances of these TV “celebrities,” but the momentary confusion that opens up between puppet and human being when first glancing at the images side-by-side. Consciously or not, there is a degree to which the person who is making this visual pun is calling “New York” no more than a media puppet. The aggression “revealed” by the uncanny logic of this joke could betray a racist or sexist hostility, as well. But beyond this hostility, perhaps there lurks a suggestion that this form of folk art has the ability to disempower the dominance of mass marketed artforms, such as the “manufactured” celebrities and characters of popular TV, through uncanny expressions of mockery and parody.

The site, at its most brilliant, can be revelatory of how forms of new media folk art perform populist expressions of resistance to (if not an outright subversion of) dominant discourses, by taking familiar images of power and status (often embodied by celebrities) and employing them in unintended ways to make a counterpoint. Above, the Vogue magazine cover is taken to task for not only suggesting something racist in its treatment of an African American basketball star as an animal (its “King Kong” reference — which is similar to the Muppet joke above), but also by lowering the ‘high fashion/high art’ status of Vogue down to the level of mere propaganda (the Army poster that originally intertextually borrowed from Kong).

Of course, the comparison attempted in the ‘totallylookslike’ image above is a bit of a stretch on behalf of the person who posted it, because they could have easily just paired the Vogue cover with an image from the King Kong film itself, which it clearly alludes to. Thus, we feel the critic, rather than the creator, at play, being highly selective, and the joke therefore doesn’t quite succeed on the level of the uncanny. Anything smacking of a critical human agency at play — a mediator — reduces the uncanny affect to a mere joke. The person who is making the comparison cannot be present for the uncanny response to “work” — it is like spotting the zipper on the monster’s back in a horror film: it betrays artifice and it’s “magic” is therefore disempowered.

In the above, a rock band’s album cover is equated to a familiar popular photograph that tabloid journalists famously proclaimed to be proof of an alien landscape or the “face of god” on Mars. The supernatural “face” is apparent in the accidental cast of shadow, itself an uncanny appearance. But anyone looking at the image of Queen next to it recognizes the latter as a carefully posed and purposely abstract work of photographic art, if not also a nostalgic memory of something they may have forgotten in their record collection. It is a clever comparison. And it’s quite funny. But it’s not quite uncanny. What we have, actually, is art referring to art — photos referring to other photos — and ultimately this is true of the entire site.

What the site really shows us is consumers of popular culture trying to make sense out of the infinite stream of messages and images that circulate in the media. That sense can only be an allusion or a visual pun — the associative logic of the dreamwork. What is the dream of icanhascheezburger.com? Perhaps it is about what its namesake reveals: an inner child crying for junk food. Only here we have the commodification of art into something resembling a cheesburger. The dream-wish expressed by the site depends on a withdrawal from reason and a repression of our awareness that popular art is a commodity, a manufactured experience that substitutes for the authentic. By pointing out the “doppelgangers” of mass culture through visual puns and pop culture allusions, the site is like a church of the popular uncanny, its posters bearing witness to “miracles” of fantastic correspondence.

In psychology, the shadow is the part of the unconscious that swallows threatening information and experiences that a conscious mind cannot hold onto and, at the same time, remain functional. However, a periodic confrontation with the shadow is necessary for a healthy psyche. In a Lynch film it is often the job of some sort of rule-maker, interrogator, or detective to engineer just such a confrontation. These detective types set boundaries on a film’s fantasy narrative and try to steer the main character back to the truth. — Adam C. Walker

The “Shadow Self and Detective” (in other words, the doppelganger and alter-ego) is one of 12 “tools” that Adam C. Walker offers in his insightful essay, “Reading Inland Empire: A Mental Toolbox for Interpreting a Lynch Film” (Metaphilm, Nov 2007). What I really like about this article is that it clearly provides a number of frameworks for comprehending David Lynch’s seemingly impenetrable narratives (not just Inland Empire itself), by looking specifically at recurring narrative structures.

My favorite doppelganger from Lynch’s work is Robert Blake as the “Mystery Man” from Lost Highway. In an interview with Cinefantastique, Lynch describes him as a “character [who] came out of a feeling of a man who, whether real or not, gave the impression that he was supernatural.”

“Whether real or not” is a hallmark of not only uncanny uncertainty, but Lynch’s proclivity for subjective realism on a plane that alienates most pop audiences. But what I like about David Lynch is this persistent use of surrealism, framed in a way that inevitably makes you wonder “Where is this going?” That is the enigma of all plot forms, but Lynch constantly keeps us guessing because the way he puts together scenes is always skewed while remaining just “familiar” enough to hook our interest. Something is going on, but we’re never told quite what it is. The “Mystery Man” embodies this, employing his camera through tout the film in dastardly ways.

Beyond character, Walker suggests that the template for understanding Lynch’s narrative strategy is Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” since Lynch seems to loop plots together as if they were echo-effects of some primary event that are pinging off the walls of a central character’s mind. There is no story so much as there is a vague sense of deja vu, as characters try to understand their own dilemmas — which are our dilemmas in the very act of experiencing the film. Paramnesia at play: the subjective experience of a Lynch film is the cinematic equivalent of waking up from not a dream, but a concussion.

…the first half of Lost Highway is so brooding and mysterious. It pushes up against the limits of what can be seen and said. So much is hinted at, and so little is shown. Even the event upon which the whole film turns, Fred’s apparent murder of Renee, does not take place on screen. We see what comes before, and what comes after. But we do not–cannot–see the act itself. It is missing from the body of the film, just as it is missing from Fred’s own consciousness. The murder drives the story, but it stands apart from the story. It is like an intrusion from another world.

Lost Highway explores this “intrusion” of the uncanny in many ways that are founded in earlier forms of cinema, rendering this film a double of other films in a highly subjective allusion to film genre history. Much has been written about this. Zizek has written a lengthy article on how the film is an “apotheosis of horror and noir genres” in his article “The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime”. Fiona Villella discusses how its “Circular Narrative” echoes the narratology of the French New Wave. Maarten de Pourcq looks at the uncanny way that sound and image work together in the film, referencing others. Alana Thain (.pdf) sees the film as “haunted by Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” And Valterri Kokko sees the uncanny at the center of “Psychological Horror in the Films of David Lynch.”

Film is a highway on which you get lost; if his movies don’t make sense to you, they are succeeding…you’re lost.

A little known fact (to me, anyway…and it may not be a fact at all) about signs of the horns (aka “Devil’s Horns” aka “the Goat” aka “Satan Fingers”):

Though not necessarily the first to ever use [horned hand gestures] in a “rock” setting, [heavy metal singer Ronnie James] Dio was without question the one who turned it into a popular symbol. So while legions of rock fans test their metal (as it were), they are also unconsciously forming an enormous protective shield against the power of the evil eye. The next time you feel the uncomfortable gaze of a stranger and fear the wrath of the evil eye, perhaps the safest place to go is your nearest heavy metal venue.

In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Freud describes the “source of the dread of the evil eye” as a sort of sublimated jealousy, rather than a fear of supernatural power:

Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look even though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people are ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power at its commend.

By comparing a person “who possesses something…valuable and fragile,” Freud seems to level the person who glares with an evil eye to something akin to a dog snarling over its bone when anyone approaches it. Thus, I read Freud’s argument about the evil eye as not merely about the psychology of envy (see Hakim Bey’s musings on this), but a manifest sign of a power conflict, an ideologeme of the political unconscious. That is, the evil eye can be read as an ideological sign that circulates in a political economy: those with fragile (symbolic/economic) power unconsciously wield it over those without such power, out of fear that they’ll lose such power.

So where in contemporary culture do we find the archaic sign of the evil eye? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has become generalized as a cyberoptic, embodied by the camera lens of “big brother” and integrated into the panoptical gaze of a paranoiac culture. I need to think about this more fully, because the evil eye has become so domesticated, its everywhere.

But for now, is it too much to suggest that when metal fans thrash their devil horns along with the rich rock musicians on stage, this is a collective sign of class resistance? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s as patently obvious as a crowd of subjects giving a king the middle finger in a transgressive festival. But the grounding of the “mal occia” heavy metal hand sign in the uncanny folklore of the evil eye makes it a very rich metaphor to consider, in terms of popular culture.

On the Uncanny . . .

It is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’…We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.